Foggy

Combat Carl

Night Drive Time Lapse

All is quiet. Incredibly quiet. Every project I'm involved with (and there are few) is at some form of a roadblock. I've just barely started writing the second draft of This American Town, which is largely due to my lack of motivation. However, now that fall is rolling around, and I carry an immense disdain for cold temperatures, I'll have more initiative to bundle up in my warm room and get to it.

I'm one of those people who's constantly motivated to start a new project, only to abandon it and finally return sometime later. For example, I'm currently reading three books. In fact, it took me four years to read Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! I would read a large portion of it, lose interest, and return to read another large portion when the interest was renewed.

Presently, I'm reinvigorating my need to get out and shoot some time-lapse photography, which was all I ever wanted to do at the beginning of this year. The same goes for film photography, which lasted about a month. In doing so, I just shot this video of my friend and I taking a little drive about my community. I'd recommend watching it in 720p fullscreen.

Time-lapse is something that has always interested me; I can never get enough. No matter how many times I've seen the same things over and over again, I feel like there's always a small and unique detail worth picking out. I like to watch the needles on the dashboard here, or at the 42-second mark when it seems like we travel backwards for a block or two. Trippy.

I'm a little upset though since my camera sensor is starting to get stuck pixels, which is why you can see some white dots here and there. I'd love to upgrade to a full-frame DSLR sometime, but money is an issue, as it always is. My nikkor 10.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens, which I believe to be the vital lens for time-lapse photography, is only compatible on the small-frame DSLR's, which means I'd have to buy the nikkor 16mm fisheye lens atop of the full-frame body. In time.

I feel like there's a better way to end this post, but I have no desire to find out. Here's to hoping something interesting pops up that is "blog" worthy. I've already broken my "one-post-per-week" rule by nearly two months.

Subjectivity

Recently, I decided to watch all of Andrei Tarkovsky's films (excluding Nostalghia). There is something about his films that I am drawn to, yet I can't explain why. I like films of all kinds, but slow films dealing with spiritual themes are the ones I seem to connect to the most. I like to unwind, forget about everything else, and let the film play itself out.

After watching his films, I checked out his book Sculpting in Time. In it, he chronicles his work while setting forth his ideologies in filmmaking. Within the first pages, a few things popped out that felt as if he'd read the first draft of This American Town and hit me over the head with it.

Going back to my post on the writing process, I talked about how awful the first draft of a screenplay usually is. See, my script suffers from something called a deus ex machina, where a character brings about insight with seemingly no motivation whatsoever. When I make a movie I hope it'll reach out to people in the most natural way possible. At this point in my life, that has been achieved (or hasn't) through a preconceived notion to which action is based around, rather than the action forming the idea. As in, I know what I want the movie to say, so I make scenes up to say that. Sometimes they are blatant, which happens a lot in the first draft of This American Town. Rather, I should be creating a scenario, the scenes that make up that scenario, and just let the meaning (whatever that may be) come about naturally through it's subjective nature.

Tarkovsky's words are from his own opinion, but I can't help but find significant truth in them. Ironically, my whole life I've been a fence sitter. My opinion of myself, people, polices, things, etc. have always been from a neutral stance with reasoning from both sides. When I read the first draft of my script I don't see that at all. I see myself trying to tell people how to be, which you just can't do.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm glad I stumbled upon these passages when I did. I'm going into writing the second draft with a new approach and a fresh mind to make a story that will hopefully be accepted by everyone.

Lake Blanche

The First Draft

I've finally completed the 97-paged first draft of This American Town. From this point, I begin chapter two in the making of this feature. At the moment, the script is in the hands of people whose opinions I value, and eventually we'll sit down for an afternoon to thoroughly talk it over. This is when collaboration kicks in and you get to watch your work get destroyed, but for good reason. If you're a filmmaker and you can't allow yourself to let go of your work and let it become a collaborative project, then there's really no point in doing what you're doing.

Nostalgia

The universe is funny in the way it presents things to us. Maybe we're just unattentive, who knows.

While this blog is mainly dedicated to my ventures in film and photography, this post will not be. I feel there's a need to branch off every once in a while since nobody likes a one trick pony. However, there's some correlation between my film work in this post, like how a lot of what I talk about is the kind of stuff you have to think about when writing a character film, but that's besides the point.

This story begins with myself contemplating titles for the screenplay I'm currently writing. While listening to a song called "The Bank and Trust" by The Elected, a lyric struck me. Blake Sennett sings, "I'm stuck in this American town." This being a story that takes place in a small town community, I felt it only right to title it This American Town.

In my overprotective state, I went to imdb.com to see if this was an original title. The closest thing that registered was a short run show on Showtime called *This American Life. I didn't think much of it at the time, just that I'm sure somewhere down the road somebody would know about the show and probably think I copied/altered the title.

January 2011 rolled around and I found myself in a university class that analyzed the role of the natural world and the virtual world in both films and novels. In the first week my professor showed us a clip on YouTube about a man who formed an unconventional relationship with his bull, and when it dies, he has it cloned. The problem is that the clone is nothing like the original and frequently attacks the man, yet he still refuses to believe there's a difference.

This clip happened to be from a short run television program called This American Life.

I felt like this was a sign, so I hopped onto Netflix, added the show to my instant queue, and watched the first six episodes. I stopped watching for a while, but soon realized it was being pulled from instant availability and decided to finish the remaining episodes.

Before that, however, I'd been working at my job, which is filming various classes and events at my school. I just finished filming a youth theatre performance, which depressed me. Seeing a bunch of kids on stage having the time of their life reminded me of my earlier days and how much I miss them. Granted, I'm only 22 and have plenty of life ahead of me. Not to mention, I'm sure every person whose transitioned into adulthood has gone through what I'm going through, which is an immense sense of nostalgia. I would consider This American Town to be a love story to those days. Not necessarily from my own childhood experience, but just the overall experience of learning and being exposed to new things as you grow.

Well... I started going into deep thought about my childhood on the drive home and how, even though it felt like forever, I can only remember snippets of it. For example, in first grade our class was secluded from the main school. Our classes and lunchroom were in portables across the street and we even had our own playground. On this playground were metal bars that formed a steam locomotive, sort of in the likes of a wireframe model. During recess a friend and I would sit in the smoke stack (the second highest point of the playground) and commentate the soccer games some of the other kids played. We even had a good sized audience who'd sit around and listen.

But... why do I remember this, of all things, in a sea of forgotten memories?

Back to the idea of the universe and how funny it is. As soon as I got home I watched an episode of This American Life that seemed to be speaking directly to me. I'm unconvinced that this is all by chance...

(Watch first, then continue reading)

It's universal wanting to forget the bad moments of our lives and hold on to the good. How can we though when we're forgetting them? We take a camera with us on vacation to remind us of the trip, but when we're too occupied with finding the right angle, we don't experience the moment properly. It's okay that you won't remember that one historical item, and you don't need to prove to people you were there. I went through the Smithsonian once and can't remember the majority of things... but I remember how I felt. That's all that matters.
As someone who's interested in telling humanistic stories, I hold a life philosophy to always cherish the feeling of memories over the memories themselves, whether they're good or bad. How will I learn if I don't?
Forgetting the memories of the past is just a part of life, and it's okay. There's a parallel between feeling and memory, and while we may naturally forget how we felt in a memory, we're constantly changing the way we feel now to remind us what it is to be human. If I could push a button to remember all things, I wouldn't do it. I want to relive them through new experiences. Positive or not.
I think, in part, this is why so many people embrace films. They're a chance to relive a feeling through an experience they've never had before.
This is why I do what I do.
*I'm aware that This American Life is originally a radio show on NPR.